Twitter Can Predict Your Next Place of Visit

Abstract

The present work focuses on predicting users' next place of visit using their past tweets. We hypothesize that tweets of the person have predictive power on his location and therefore can be used to predict his next place of visit. This problem is important for location based advertising and recommender based services. To predict the next place of visit, we calculate the probabilities of visiting different types of places using bank of binary classifiers and Markov models. More specifically, we train bank of binary classifiers on past tweets and calculated the probabilities of visiting next places. Since bank of binary classifiers is based on a bag-of-words model, to account for time of last visited place and place itself, we built Markov models for different time duration to calculate probabilities of visiting next place. Empirical evaluation shows that by combining the probabilities obtained from bank of binary classifiers and Markov models the accuracy of predicting next place increased from 65% to 80%.